Andy ngo

Thursday

Charles Moore

Winston Marshall is more than a martyr

Is Winston Marshall — guitarist, banjo player, composer of Mumford & Sons, and father of the west London ‘Nu-Folk’ music that eventually conquered the world — a martyr to the Twitter mob? I find his story more interesting than that. He was trolled earlier this year for tweeting in favor of a book by Andy Ngo about the power of the far-left in the United States. (I haven’t read the book; I gather it is polemical, but in no way fascist.) Because of the difficulties this created for the band, he apologized, but later felt uneasy since he believed he had said nothing wrong. After consulting his fellow band members, he decided he wanted to be able to speak out. The best way to respect the mutual accountability by which they operate was to leave the band altogether.

winston marshall

Wednesday

Cockburn

Sigh Ngo more: Mumford disowns a son

Pity the poor rockstar who finds himself embroiled in the culture wars because he liked the wrong book. Winston Marshall, banjo player for  the hugely successful band Mumford and Sons, almost certainly had no idea what he was getting himself into when he decided to tweet praise at Andy Ngo, the conservative journalist, for his best-selling book about the horrors of antifa. 'Finally had time to read your important book. You’re a brave man,' tweeted Marshall, referring to the conservative journalist’s latest periodical Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy. The book describes itself as telling 'the story of this violent hate group from the very beginning'. Queue a barrage of condemnation from the Twittersphere, accusing Marshall of 'endorsing fascism'.

winston marshall mumford and sons

Monday

Will Lloyd

No, antifa won’t destroy democracy

‘Are elk racist?’ It seems, on the face of it, a peculiar question; but this is a peculiar time. For 120 years a bronze elk sat atop a fountain between Chapman and Lownsdale squares in downtown Portland. Elk feed on grasses, leaves, and bark. They enjoy the shy seclusion of forest habitats and the untamable pride which accompanies being one of the largest terrestrial mammals in North America. Their political significance is oblique. But not in Portland. In Portland even the most blameless statue is a standing target and a symbol of oppression. Following the death of George Floyd, the elk was covered in graffiti over and over again by protesters. In an impromptu attempt at  barbecuing the creature, the mob tried to set the statue on fire.

antifa

Monday

Cockburn

The antifa aesthetic

Two months ago, opinion editor James Bennet left the New York Times after, among other things, publishing a senator’s claim that antifa had infiltrated Black Lives Matter protests.Now, two months later, the press doesn’t just admit antifa’s existence. It’s giving them glamorous photo spreads.The Washington Post on Saturday released an essay profiling Portland antifa. The piece never uses the word 'riot'; 'violence' is only mentioned in reference to clashes with the right, not police or besieged courthouse personnel. But the heart of the article isn’t its text. It’s the Post’s determined effort to show that while far-left rioters may claim to be anti-fascism, they are definitely not anti-fashion.

antifa

Tuesday

Melissa Chen

How a New Jersey brewery unwittingly became the latest culture war battleground

Police barricades bookended South Broadway, the main thoroughfare of downtown Pitman, N.J, as parked police cars bathed the street in an eerie glow of flashing blue and red lights. Officers on duty stood around with arms folded, surveying the scene and instructing pedestrians where to walk. A crowd had gathered on the lawn of Ballard Park, so often the setting of food festivals and community events, across the way from a row of establishments – all shuttered except for one, the Human Village Brewing Company. What tragedy could have befallen this small leafy borough where not a single chain store is in sight, where children can safely bike around unsupervised, a place whose official slogan is ‘Everybody Likes Pitman?

brewery

Friday

Andy Ngo

How I became an ‘extremist’ overnight

Ever since being beaten and robbed by Antifa in Portland in June, I have continued to receive threats of violence, which have prompted attention from police. But the scale of the abuse I received on Tuesday morning after waking up was unprecedented. The source of the rage? A Daily Beast hit piece headlined, 'Right-wing star Andy Ngo exits Quillette after damning video surfaces.' This was followed by another story in the Washington Examiner, shared in a tweet, which said I was out at Quillette 'after controversial video surfaces showing him doing nothing to stop or report violent attack.' This was followed by more hit pieces on VICE and Media Matters.

andy ngo extremist

Thursday

Cockburn

What’s ngext for Andy Ngo?

Andy Ngo has flown the Quillette nest. The Portland-based provocateur, famous for his hate crime-debunking Twitter threads, CCTV coverage of Antifa protests and narrative-driven writing on Islam, left his role as subeditor for the Australian Intellectual Dark Web magazine this week. The circumstances of his departure are unclear, but the timing is suspect: last Thursday a Portland Mercury reporter circulated a video that shows Ngo near to members of the far-right group Patriot Prayer immediately prior to a violent clash with Antifa. Ngo himself is yet to comment. https://twitter.com/alex_zee/status/1164406638519803905 Quillette editor Claire Lehmann said this was a coincidence.

andy ngo

Saturday

Caroline McCarthy

Who counts as a journalist, anyway?

As a young journalist in the mid-2000s, there was the occasional circumstance where I was asked to ‘prove it’: upon showing up to a news event I was covering, whoever ran check-in insisted that I show some press credentials. You know, those badges you see on episodes of Law & Order to denote that someone’s a reporter. (More often than not, the guest star probably holds it up and indignantly yells ‘Press!’ in order to enter a crime scene.) Working for a digital-first outlet – CNET Networks, later acquired by CBS – I never had anything like it except maybe business cards. To me, it seemed like an antiquated request; to the people checking my legitimacy, it was an obvious question.

journalist